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If you haven't read "The Half-Blood Prince" then stop reading

now, for spoilers await ye' with nasty sharp pointy teeth.

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Aunt Petunia is a witch (certainty 60%)

• We already know she's been in touch with Dumbledore, possibly more than once. 
• She knows waaaay too much about the wizarding world. 
• She shares a bloodline with Lily Potter, and according to J.K. Rowling's OWN FAQ she is not a Squib.

So, if she's got magic parents, and she's not a squib, then she must be a witch.  Why then, is she living as a muggle?  I think she's perhaps sworn off magic in an effort to hide out from Voldemort, or at least not draw attention to herself.  Perhaps she even had her memory modified so that she wouldn't know she was a witch, but over the years her memory is repairing itself.  Who knows?  The important thing is that you can logically conclude that she was a witch.  Now it's possble that she's only Lily's HALF-sister, and does not in fact have any magic parents, in which case my theory is shot.  Since we know that Lily was called a "MudBlood" by Snape from his own memory in the pensieve, we can assume that one of her parents was a muggle.  It's probably in there somewhere, but I'm not sure off the top of my head.

CORRECTION:
After some minor amounts of research on a couple of fan sites, I see that Lily was muggle-born, so BOTH her parents are muggles.  But there must be some wizard blood in her history SOMEWHERE for her to be a witch, so maybe Petunia has it too.  We'll see.

• Dumbledore's too smart to trust Snape without a pretty f'n good reason.
  Everyone in the world thinks Snape's a sleaze, but Dumbledore won't here a word of it.  Also McGonagall said that his reason was "ironclad" although she did not know it herself.
• He completely froze Harry rather than telling him to hide.
  If Dumbledore didn't KNOW ahead of time that things were going to get "weird", he wouldn't have frozen Harry, but simply would have silenced him, or TOLD him to remain quiet while he talked to Malfoy.  Certainly in the time it takes to utter "Petrificus Totalus", he could have said "Silencio" much more easily.
• Wizards have faked their own deaths before.
  If Pettigrew could do it, then certainly Snape and Dumbledore could pull it off together.
• Broken spells
  If Dumbledore's "Petrificus Totalus" spell abated instantly on his "death", why do the death eaters still have to run to the edge of the grounds before disapparating?  Now this isn't a very strong argument, since you would expect the castle enchantments to be of a slightly more permanent nature when cast.  It doesn't actually do a lot of good to put up protections if all it takes is eliminating a single person to disable them, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
• New concepts in this book.
  To take a jaded, analytical look at things:  Why introduce the entirely new concept of non-verbal casting in this book if it is not of some importance to the story?  Also the idea of the Horcrux.  It's essential to why Voldemort is immortal, but could also just be handy enough to save Dumbledore's butt, right?  You have to commit murder to create one, but who says you can't "Save" the sould you're killing at the time, eh?
• Snape's combination of abilities.
  Snape is an "Accomplished Occlumens", able to hide his thoughts from even the other teachers and Dumbledore himself.  So he may just be the only person we know of capable of casting one spell non-verbally while speaking the words to another spell, and NOT being detected by those around him.  Snape's ability as a "legilimens" would have let him read Dumbledore's thoughts at that critical moment so that Dumbledore could tell him "Do it now!" without having to use some sign or code-word that might have seemed suspicious.
• And the really jaded answer.
  It's no fun to have the guy you've hated through the whole series turn out to actually be a bad guy, is it?  Where's the twist in that?  Where's the intrigue?  Rowling is FAR more interesting than that.
• But what about the new portrait in the headmaster's office?
  No-one has ever said that the portraits are only of dead people, and he did have a chance while Harry was off retrieving his invisibility cloak to have set up the painting himself, knowing that this was the night he must disappear.  It could very well be that the portraits exist throughout a headmaster's tenure so that they may observe and remember the things he's done.  Also, that portrait never speaks.  It could very well be a moving picture like those in the Daily Prophet, couldn't it?  And again with the jaded analytical argument.  McGonagall makes what is only described as an "odd movement, as if steeling herself" when she sees the new portrait.  It's not like Rowling to barely describe things like that unless she has a very good reason for it.

I'll add more as I think of them, but these are the two most interesting areas of thought for me right now.

While I'm on the subject of entertainment gone pathetic.  Many people who know me know that I despise Anime.  I consider it the laziest form of animation.  I feel it grew out of a need to shovel crap onto our televisions as quickly as possible in the 70's.  Think "Battle of the Planets" and you'll know what I mean.  If you want a more extreme example, think "Speed Racer".  At least that had the added hilarity of trying to cram half an hour's worth of Japanese dialog into half an hour of spoken English.  In both of these cartoons, entire conversations between characters could be animated with as little as four frames of animation because the characters only had two poses, one with the mouth open, one with the mouth closed, and if the budget was really extravagant you might have an occasional "blink" frame.

To some extent, you see the same thing in old Hanna Barbara cartoons of the same era, such as Scooby Doo.  Whenever anyone's talking everyone has to hold very very still, and even then only the mouth of the person talking was animated.  But HEY, at least HB made up three or four frames worth of mouth poses.  The Japanese cartoons of the 70's were far more basic by comparison.

Fast forward a few decades, and now Anime has become a "style", and "art form" of its own.  It's been elevated to some lofty idealized sub-genre of animation to be revered and respected on its own merits.  I fail to SEE any merits.  If you were to perform a frame-by-frame analysis of a typical half hour Anime cartoon, and then put that next to anything produced by the cartoon network (Yes, including Samurai Jack... resolve THAT) I think you'd probably find that the Anime contains less than 50% of the actual animation of the domestic product.  And it's that the point of animation... that it's animated!  (By the way, I realize most of the "domestic product" is also produced in Japan, but we're discussing style here, not production houses)

I mentioned Samurai Jack a moment ago.  Many people consider it to be Anime.  I disagree.  I beleive it's what Anime should have evolved into.  Samurai Jack is Anime inspired, but it's far beyond Anime quality.  With the advances in cell animation on computers the quality of all animation should be increasing, not decreasing as time goes on.  Using computers to do the traditional ink & paint operations means that a studio can build up an enormous library of character poses, walk cycles, and mouth positions, and then mix and match those with far more flexibility than was possible using traditional cels.  Say you have a right-to-left walk cycle, but you need a left-to-right... just mirror it.  It's far easier than the equivalent photographic process would have been.  You can't just flip a hand painted cell over and expect it to look right.  Also, you can scale, stretch, squash, rotate... pretty much anything you want using a computer.  Fred and Daphne wouldn't have to spend their whole lives wearing the same clothes because re-coloring their line drawings would be a much faster process on computer.

So why is animation getting worse?  Case in point: Ghost in the Shell (Anime fans gasp.  "Did he just say that?")  Yes I did.  I tried to watch this crap over the weekend.  I really tried.  The stories weren't that bad, but my God, they've dispensed with 90% of the talking now because the "Section 9" people communicate telepathically.  This now means that entire conversations were animated using TWO still frames of the characters involved.  What the?  This is the 21st century, people!  I want BETTER product than the 70's, not worse.  The opening sequence promises animation of a quality that the show simply does not deliver.  It's like the difference between the FMV sections of a Final Fantasy game and the actual gameplay.  The difference is simply staggering.  And what's with the stupid blue robots?  Are you going to tell me that someone would invent killer military robots and then give them giggly 14-year-old mall-rat personalities?  And who decided to animate the most annoying characters in the whole series better than the rest of the characters combined?  It just doesn't make any sense, people.

Several people have recently recommended that I see "Appleseed".  It's supposed to be CGI that's been rendered as cel-shading.  I could probably stand that.  It would have the look of traditional hand animation without the perpetually declining quality of hand animation.  And it's not like hand-animation can't be done well.  Look at any of the decades of hand animated features that Disney put out.  I'm not talking about script quality, fidelity to the original stories they appropriate, or the straight-to-video sequels they generate at roughly half the quality of the originals.  I'm simply talking about the animation of the features themselves.  It's fluid, it moves, and people actually talk and sometimes sing without holding still.  This is big-budget stuff, I don't expect Shaggy to hold a conversation while doing cartwheels, although that should be possible by this point too.

So call me a heretic.  I thought Akira was stupid.  I hated Lensmen.  I loathe Ghost in the Shell.  I gave them all a chance, I really did.  I gave them all a chance, and they all disappointed me.

While the heavy rotation period of Hoobastank's "The Reason" has died down, I'm still surprised to hear this song being played on the radio.  At the very least I'm surprised it's still being played on "men's" radio stations.  You know, the kind of stations with crude 14 year old humor in their station IDs.  The kind of stations you don't expect to have a large female audience.

Why?  Because this has to be the least manly song ever written, that's why.

The song would normally fit my tastes in complexity.  It has lots of key changes, especially between major and minor chords.  It shows a decent adherance to the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/break/verse/chorus formula.  Finally, the singer's voice does not make me want to claw my ears off by being too whiney or otherwise unpleasant.

So why do I hate this song?  It's the lyrics.  These are the least testosterone-fueled lyrics ever penned by a male... or at least by a heterosexual male.  In all the time this song has been on the radio, I've never paid that much attention to the lyrics, having been caught up in the chord progressions up to this point.  This weekend, the song was on the radio while I was making lunch for the family in the kitchen, and it STILL made me feel more manly than normal in contrast to its mere presence in the air.  I listened to the lyrics for the first time, and I kept hearing a whip-crack sound effect in my head as each successive line of the song was delivered.  I certainly hope there's a wedding ring involved in whatever relationship inspired this song because if you're THAT whipped while still in the dating phase you can forget any plans you had to watch sporting event of any kind in the future... except figure skating of course.

(Actually I rather like figure skating, but in the same way I like auto racing... I'm just watching it for the crashes.)

The only explanation I can come up with for this song is that it was an assignment or condition of some kind of "counselling" session.  Yes, that's right, I suspect that this song was an assignment handed down by an argyle-cardigan-wearing, Yanni-listening, Tofu-eating caricature of a marriage counsellor in a sentance that undoubtedly ended with the words "...if you are truly committed to making this relationship work".

Now I'm not saying that there's no validity to making an effort to keep a relationship together, but that's just not Rock & Roll.  Rock & Roll means hyper-masculine songs about using people up and throwing them away, even if those songs are written by the very same people attending relationship "workshops" in their private lives.  Keep that stuff private will ya?

Rock & Roll is about ugly guys getting groupies because they're in a band.  Geddy Lee, Gene Simmons, Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Noddly Holder (Look it up), Ronny James Dio, do I really need to continue?  I think you see what I'm driving at.  Our "Rock" stations are playing music that more and more is starting to sound like boy bands for adults.  Make it stop, for God's sake MAKE IT STOP!

So harsh, so wrong, so... accurate?

http://www.sportspickle.com/features/volume3/2004-0609-spellingbee.html

So, Michael Jackson was found innocent... or rather not proven guilty a'la O.J.

Is our justice system totally failing in the case of celebrities, or is it possible that Jackson really is as weird as he claims to be, and isn't "into" children the way the rest of us think he is.  I don't know, but all of the people who claim to have first hand knowledge of any wrongdoings are exactly the sort of people looking to be paid off: Underpaid household staff, disgruntled ex-employees, and parents who let their kids go to Neverland even after the allegations started.

What if he really is just a big kid?  A creepy, mid 40's, plastic-surgery-addicted kid.  I mean... it is possible, isn't it?  I mean, it's really reeeeeaaaly unlikely, but it is ever-so-slightly possible.

Or, have we degenerated into a society so politically correct that we can't even take a hard stance on our own celebrity criminals because it might offend their fans?  Personally, I think that's the more likely situation.  On the one hand you've got people who will blindly proclaim the celebrity's innocence because they grew up listening to their music, or watching their team play.  On the other hand, you've got people with no vested interest in the celeb's well being who figure "Hey, at least no-one will trust him with their kids anymore." and let him walk rather than spend the rest of their lives debating in a jury room with the fanboys who wouldn't be swayed by security camera footage of the crime in progress.

But then what happens?  You just watch.  Assuming Jackson can buy it back, there will be a waiting list to get into Neverland now, a waiting list populated with evil, greedy parents looking to be the next to threaten a lawsuit in an effort to cash in on what's left of Jacko's money.  Suing Jackson will become a cottage industry in itself, and there will rise a special breed of lawyers that specialize in chasing him the way other lawyers chase ambulances.

...and what if he really didn't do anything?

So I saw Star Wars Episode III, right?  Stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.

Anyway, it occurred to me that while Lucas was busy tying up loose ends, he left one dangling all over the floor, and it would have been terribly simple to have included it.  Ever since Episode I came out, I've been trying to figure out how Yoda can go from total badass to feeble old fart in the span of 17 years.  Up to this point I've just written it off by assuming that Yoda's race just hits the wall extra hard when they reach it.  900 years of whoop-ass and then you trade in your light saber for a colostomy bag.

Well, that final lightning fight with Palpatine would have been the perfect excuse.  Hey, look what lightning did to Palpatine in the fight with Windu, and he was just PRETENDING to get the beat-down.  Yoda, on the other hand, truly got his little green heinie stomped.  But then he got up and crawled away.  Not an injured, dragging his limp, broken body away crawl, either.  This was a garden-variety "I'm gettin' outta here" kind of crawl, and he would have been walking if he'd picked a larger escape route.  C'MON!  This was the chance to explain it.  Obviously SOME thought went into Yoda's future or they wouldn't have bothered with him talking about going into hiding.  All it would have taken was a shot of Jimmy Smitts picking Yoda up instead of just hovering there while he jumped into the car.

And furthermore, if the lightning fight had been in Lucas' mind all along then he could have dispensed with the cane altogether for the forst two movies.  It always struck me as lame that Yoda walks with a cane until it's time to fight.  You can say he's hiding his prowess by pretending to be feeble to catch people off guard, and that may work on the random mugger in the alley, but even the StormTroopers figure it out when he throws the cane aside, ignites the saber and gives the "come get some" look.  The element of surprise is definitely lost by that point.

Blew that one, Lucas did, hmmm?
Other than that... Two thumbs up, Mel sez check it out.